dear historians: "google" is a starting point...

[acroyear]

...but you better damn well double-check the potential bias factor of your sources before you go including it in a textbook, dammit...

Loudoun schools remove textbook that claims black soldiers fought for South:

The publisher has said it will provide a sticker to cover the flawed sentence in "Our Virginia." The state Board of Education, which approved the book, said this week that the claim about African Americans fighting for the Confederacy falls "outside of mainstream Civil War scholarship."

The textbook's author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian, told The Washington Post this week that she substantiated her assertion about black Confederate soldiers primarily by doing an Internet search, which led her to the work of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some other sources. The heritage group disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War.

Comments

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

Aside from the historical argument (was it *really* economics, slavery, culture war, or what)--the problem with this sentence is that the author is a popularizer, whose major works are short-entry cyclopedias of semi trivia, based on secondary and tertiary sources. (Oh Yuck, and Oh Yipes, iirc, books for kids and YAs about oddball stuff in history).

There are plenty of professional historians, many of whom can and have written elementary school textbooks. Some are liberal, some conservative, some libertarian, etc. But all know how to do research, and where to look. (And, when they run across a "fact" that appears outside the generally accepted current interpretation, they check it out.
(Aside from the general claim, note that the book says 2 "brigades" of slaves were formed under Stonewall Jackson--a lot of slaves armed in the first half of the war doesn't seem likely, and Jackson was killed in '63. It's easy to check on the units under a given area commander).

So, why did the state hire an amateur popularizer without any serous editorial board? (CNN reported that the editorial people were three elementary teachers, who are, more or less by definition, generalists, not experts, in history).

Being curmudgeon here, but up until about a decade or so ago, textbooks were heavily vetted; but that costs lots of money and takes time.